I choose to live and to Lie, kill and give and to Die/
Learn and love, and to Do what it takes to Step Through…

Professional Activities

Shemrez Nauman Afzal is currently working as Project Coordinator for Jinnah Institute, a non-profit public policy organization based in Islamabad which functions as a think tank, advocacy group and public outreach organization independent of Government of Pakistan. A former Research Analyst at Spearhead Research, Shemrez has also been a third-party evaluation consultant for the World Bank. He has also been a Residential College Co-ordinator (RC M64) at LUMS.

Education

He is an alumnus of Aitchison College and Lahore University of Management Sciences, where he obtained his B.Sc. (Hons) in Economics and specialized in research methodologies, political economy, econometrics, philosophy of economics and economic development.

News and Information Media

He is a freelance columnist and a defense and intelligence analyst specializing in military strategy, War on Terror in South Asia, Islamic de-radicalization and counter-extremism methodologies, international political economy, and open-source intelligence. He also deals with – and writes on – various issues pertaining to economics, politics, foreign policy, security, and nu media (or information dissemination processes of the Internet Age). He has contributed to The Daily Times (Pakistan) and The Friday Times. He has also been Associate Editor of the LUMS college publication, ‘The Political Animal’.

Interests and Current Activity

Shemrez is interested in social media networking, interfacing between various social mobilizers and mobilizing entities/ideas/platforms, and institutional synergies which encourage progressive and growth-oriented trends in individuals and societies; it sounds really complicated but is simple and easy when you think about it…

Shemrez is currently:

• studying counterinsurgency and counterintelligence in Pakistan, which is perhaps the most volatile front in the Global War on Terror, and also dealing with security issues, military strategy and foreign politics/international relations pertaining to this subject of inquiry,
• trying to understand the politics of identity and economics of marginalization that lies beneath the pervasive poverty hydra in South Asia, in view of a post-colonial rearrangement of society into a modern and democratic republic in practice and experience, not just in name and label,
• looking at Pakistani politics with a view of general elections in Dec 2012/Jan 2013, when political parties of the treasury and opposition benches will – for the first time in Pakistan’s history – have to go back to the masses and be judged for their 5-year legislative and executive performance, and how the elections in Pakistan will play out in terms of regime change, continuation of the incumbent government, the incumbent Presidency, and policies of the current regime – and whether local government elections will follow suit or not,
• analyzing social mobilization techniques – especially among urban and rural youth – that reflect the innovativeness, dynamism and positive outlook of the people of Pakistan in solving their own problems themselves,
• reviewing and assessing modern media techniques – including those employed by information/news media, electronic media, and social media – to estimate their impact on society, on values, on information, knowledge and awareness, and on human agency and the will to bring change,
• figuring out how bureaucratic, civil and state services can be made more efficient and sensitive to public requirements by changing institutional ethos and functional goals of agents and officials,
• going through data, evidence and reports on the economy of Pakistan – how it is surviving and progressing in the face of power crises, raw materials shortages, cost-push inflation pressures, international competitiveness, fall in global demand and recession; all of this a year after suffering one of the deadliest human catastrophes in modern times, while recovering from two earthquakes that had happened in the mid-2000′s,
• working on various India-Pakistan Track II peace initiatives, with a variety of stakeholders, to further the process of peace between two important South Asian neighbours, and to ascertain the possibilities of greater economic, social, political, cultural engagement, and people-to-people interaction, between the two countries; primarily by bring together key policy experts and opinion-makers from both countries together to discuss various issues of bilateral, multilateral and global importance, their relevance to the two countries and to South Asia at large, and ways and means to forge stronger bilateral bonds through formal engagement with the government, and through identifying opportunities for Indo-Pak co-operation, collaboration and mutual benefit in all possible fields and dimensions – to this end Shemrez has participated in the Delhi Dialogue 2011, the Chaophraya Dialogues 9 & 10, and the Islamabad Dialogue II (2012)

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